Google has confirmed that it is pulling the plug on its PowerMeter service and that Google Health is also going to be killed off.

Two services that Google established with the idea that:

with more and better information, people can make smarter choicesare to be dropped on the grounds that they haven't been sufficiently widely adopted.

Google PowerMeter, an energy monitoring tool launched in 2009 that allows you to view your home's energy consumption from anywhere online, will be switched off on September 16 and users are being advised to export their data before that date after which it will no longer be accessible. Users can create a CSV file to preserve their historical information or switch to one of the alternative services being offered by Google Partners that have been based on the PowerMeter API which on Google's recent list of scrapped APIs.

Google Health is being discontinued as a service on January 1, 2012. After this date, users will no longer be able to view, enter or edit their data but they will be able to download the data in several formats for a further year. When Google Health was launched in May 2008 the idea that patients could manage and share their own medical and prescription records was a controversial one. Perhaps its main achievement is that there is now an obvious successor in Microsoft Health Vault so users are not being left in the lurch.

However, scrapping these services does suggest that when Google isn't top it decides to pull out. This isn't very reassuring for any user deciding to trust a Google service or for any developer basing a service on a Google API.

Microsoft has increased the prize money for the 2017 Imagine cup and introduced an additional stipulation, Azure is required for all projects. Microsoft is also running a Hello Cloud contest for [ ... ]